Good places to put zines in Sevilla [No.1] – Red House

Where? One of the winding alley-streets of Sevilla. You’ll never find it.

Is there a signed photo of Yaphet Kotto above the door? No.

Details:

Like I just wrote next to ‘where?’, this place is tough to find, because every place is tough to find in Sevilla. The streets start and end within a few feet of each other and then twist and turn until you end up back at Plaza Nueva looking at that fucking cathedral again.

But if you do find it, you’ll have found a decent place. I didn’t stay there long, but there were no twats that I could hear and the guy behind the counter was decent.

Obviously, my first line was ‘do you speak Slovenian?’ and my second, ‘do you speak English?’ and guess which one he spoke. Turns out he knows a bit about zines even though there aren’t many zine people in Sevilla – he lived in London for a couple of years, where zines grow on trees – and he was kind enough to let us put the Gupter zine and a few Planet Rasputins on some of the tables.

What else?

They didn’t have any other zines, but there were some black and white photographs of industrial parts of Sevilla. They didn’t have a photo of Sevilla’s giant waffle – the largest giant waffle in the world, the tourist board says – but if I lived there I’d probably be sick of it too.

The staff guy also said they had events sometimes, like exhibition parties for whatever new set of pictures they’re putting on the walls. I suppose most places do this, but just because everyone else does it doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing to do. And really, you can still distinguish your events from others by being funnier than other places or more relaxed and less wanky.

Any more?

Not sure what else to say. This will be the only entry for Sevilla as Red House Café was the only place we found that took our zines. There were three other places we went to – one was closed down, another was a comics shop that had no zines, and the other place didn’t even know what a zine was. I figured ‘zine’ would be the same in Spanish, but no…not that it mattered…the guy behind the desk said they didn’t take stuff like ours, either because it wasn’t promoted by someone important or because he just thought it looked shit. Fair enough. It’s his shop.

Is Sevilla a cultural desert?

No idea. We were only there for three days, and we did find a few art spaces online so it’s not completely apocalyptic. But it doesn’t seem like there’s a huge amount going on.

Except Red House Café, of course.

How to get there?

Don’t even know where to start. Go to the road that runs from the river to the giant waffle and take one of the left turns on the way. If you get lost, ask for help. If no-one speaks English or Slovenian, speak Spanish. If you can’t understand what they’re saying, speak harder.